In all due seriousness though, need more details, some of them absolve Uber as it stands. Crossing while not in a cross walk. What was the area like?..step out from between cars? or behind a truck? What was the speed limit and how fast was Uber car going?

And safety drivers? ...anyone that has had to sit and watch a screen or anything else for extended amounts of time..just in case something happens..will tell you how good that system works.

when just preliminary information, it doesnt sound any different than a pedestrian walking out in front of a human driving a car.. autonomous does not defeat physics.

As far as the public says UBER IS GUILTY.

Nominated for second-dumbest Ars post of 2018.

That is actually not dumb. He or she is referring to is how the public perceives what occurred will be more important than what actually happened.

Yeah, no. You haven't looked at the context which is the same poster has already, without any information at all, determined that this is a case of Uber murdering someone.

Part of the job of a human driver is to avoid killing pedestrians even when those pedestrians do something really, really stupid. Self-driving cars have to be held to the same standard.

Part of the job of pedestrians, when stepping into an active trafficway is to ensure it's safe to cross.

Particularly outside of a marked or unmarked* crosswalk, or when crossing against a pedestrian traffic control. At least in my state, the "yield to pedestrians" law doesn't seem to apply to pedestrians outside of crosswalks or crossing against a signal within a crosswalk. Pedestrians are actually required to yield to cars.

That said, having right-of-way doesn't mean you get to hit pedestrians anymore than it means you get to hit other cars...the standard duty to avoid collisions when possible applies. But when investigating any such collision, absent evidence to the contrary, the party with right-of-way will (by my understanding) tend to start with benefit of the doubt.

In this case obviously we should have a full dataset to determine what happened and whether the accident was avoidable, something we generally don't have otherwise.

* - Every intersection within city limits is defined as an unmarked crosswalk, IIRC.

There is bound to be some injuries when everyone is attempting to conquer the market, as fast as they can, and not properly going over the data and updating their cars in a timely manner.I mean, if there was a reason why we are getting screwed every day, it's going to be Uber.Then again, they might have done a good job, and this was just a fluke. A fluke that should have, by law, all of it's data related to it, given to all autonomous car makers, so that this can be avoided.

Anyways, I can't wait for the GTA self driving car mod, where there are cars running astray, and you have to dodge them.

Very unfortunate, but it was only a matter or time before a fatality related event occurred. Self driving technology is meant to be safer than human drivers, but not infallible. Hopefully with the plethora of sensors on board, the circumstances of the accident can be easily reviewed and preventative measures (if any are possible) can be taken.

"Total perfection or nothing at all" is the modern mantra, unfortunately. To some people, if it's not 100% safe and effective it might as well be 0% safe and effective (as some of the more downvoted posts in this thread show).

The industry has fed this narrative themselves. They've pushed to fast track DMV approvals with the justification that self-driving cars will effectively eliminate traffic casualties and delays are measured in bodily injuries.

Everyone should have predicted that this would happen. If politicians really wanted to improve safety instead of lining their own pockets, they would have pushed for expansion to fixed rail and removed cars from the streets.

And stop whining about how expensive or inefficient it is to run railways across the continental U.S. That never stopped the highway system from being built, which by the way was originally built in a time where the top marginal tax rate was approximately 90%.

Automated cars are over-engineered hype. They don't solve any of our existing traffic problems, and they certainly aren't safer than having humans behind the wheel.

"...they certainly aren't safer than having humans behind the wheel." Actually, they probably are safer.

PROVE IT

Then as a bonus, prove to me that trains are more dangerous than cars, because my original point was that trains are safer.

So both the Uber self-driving apparatus *and* the safety driver failed to prevent the collision with the pedestrian. Let that sink in a moment. This has to be some variant of "dashed out from between parked cars" (i.e. insufficient duration of visibility for driver to have adequate time to react).

(Edited to remove split infinitive.)

Second edit: "has to be" is a jumping to conclusions, mea culpa. But one wonders what the precise circumstances are that two independently developed vehicle control systems (the Uber apparatus and the safety driver) both failed to prevent the collision.

To use the colloquial phrase: cause shit happens. IRL you can plan, assess risks, put presumed mitigations in place, and still end up at the wrong end of a fast moving vehicle.That's how life works. There's no tech to cure it.

t. This has to be some variant of "dashed out from between parked cars" (i.e. insufficient duration of visibility for driver to have adequate time to react).

I don't think it *has* to be, but it's certainly a possibility. Without more information, it's probably too soon to speculate on the exact cause. My condolences to the family.

Unless the car was pushed by another car, then the system failed to protect the public's safety. It should be the #1 priority above everything else that the system has to save lives where a human driver could've prevented it the system must be challenged to meet or exceed human driver capabilities.

There are plenty of circumstances where nothing can prevent the collision, including notably suicide.

If the safety driver wasn't able to prevent the collision while the autonomous vehicle was in control I doubt they would have been able to do anything under regular driving circumstances either.

Its probably wise to wait until we have more info before making such assumptions.

I am pretty confident in my human ability to drive in a forward direction without hitting pedestrians.

If someone stepped out from between parked cars without warning ten feet from your bumper while you were traveling say 30 mph (below the speed limit of 35 mph for that road), how exactly would you confidently prevent that accident? Temporarily pause spacetime? Increase the coefficient of friction of your tires by an order of magnitude by force of will?

So if a plane fails and kills all the passengers on board, is that murder? Should airlines be held responsible for accidents? I don't want to invoke the slippery slope fallacy, but that's a dangerous line of thinking if taken to its logical conclusion.

Would we be saying the same thing if this happend to Waymo instead of Uber?

I'm not sure I can find a case where a plane just "failed." Almost every aviation death can be backtracked to some kind of cause. Failure to maintain. Outside interference. Pilot error. I'd be interested in a citation where such a plane wreck was attributed to "plane failed."

If the safety driver wasn't able to prevent the collision while the autonomous vehicle was in control I doubt they would have been able to do anything under regular driving circumstances either.

I really hope the safety driver doesn't get pinned for this (provided they weren't drunk or otherwise impaired).

Well given the amount of sensor data recording if the driver is not at fault this is probably the best possible vehicle to be in. Drivers get blamed for accidents all the time when it isn't their fault and insurance companies often settle because proving would be too tough in court.

Details are still minimal but I would note the article says it happened outside of a crosswalk. If someone steps out from between two parked cars without warning a few feet from a moving vehicle even with 0 ms reaction time physics is going to win.

Definitely too early to tell the cause for sure, but I agree 100% agree that there is going to be a boatload of information that will come out in the wash with regards to this accident.

If Uber's algorithm wasn't up to the task of being on public roads, that's one thing. But if there is video + logs + witness reports that clearly show what happened then we'll find out one way or the other.

I only mentioned that I hope the driver doesn't get pinned because it has a very similar feel to what a train driver goes through when someone jumps on the tracks. It's traumatic enough as it is and there may have been very little (possibly nothing) they could have done to stop it.

Actually dipshit its not for the fact the vast majority of hte public don't always go to the street corner to cross the street. But now your the dumbest ars poster.

A. [citation needed]. And also, clearly your parents never gave you the "if all your friends were jumping off a bridge would you do it too?" speech. The answer is no, by the way. Be a competent adult and don't get peer pressured into doing dumb, unsafe things like jaywalking. If you take nothing else from this tragedy, then learn from her example and always cross at the crosswalk.

2. Crosswalks are there for this exact reason. They are there to save lives. Make no mistake, this doesn't absolve drivers of the responsibility to look out for pedestrians who do the stupid thing and try to cross somewhere that isn't a crosswalk. But it's hard not to criticize the victim when someone jumps out from between two parked cars in the middle of the street instead of just walking to the end of the block and crossing at the crosswalk.

I'll admit that when it suits me I'll cross a major road outside of a crosswalk... but I'll only do it while going when I have very carefully checked that it is clear for me to do so- ie, I am putting in the effort to make sure I can cross safely, not assuming that drivers will swerve and brake to avoid hitting me.

Maybe if the 'intelligent' technology was also attached to pedestrians.............

Seriously though, I wonder if an app could be forced to run on phones that bleep when there's a self-driving car nearby. Maybe something that knows your'e on foot and starts automatically. There's talk of using tech products to help the blind when cars become too quiet.

According to the NHTSA, the fatality rate in 2016 was 12.5 deaths per billion (yes, 1e9) miles driven. That number included pedestrian deaths, and doesn't exclude deaths where pedestrians are at fault.

It seems to be widely believed that human drivers are horribly unsafe and self-driving cars will be better. But the thing that human beings excel at is dealing with the unexpected, which might include a pedestrian doing something stupid, and it's really tough to program that in.

At this stage, no one has done enough testing to conclude that any particular self-driving system is safer than human drivers, or even within a factor of ten, because we don't have nearly enough data. You'd need millions of miles without a death, and here is a death, and people on this comment thread are trying to explain why we should ignore it.

Part of the job of a human driver is to avoid killing pedestrians even when those pedestrians do something really, really stupid. Self-driving cars have to be held to the same standard.

I agree that self-driving cars will have to be held to the same standard. AForbes article I just read said that Uber reached the 2 million miles driven mark as of late December (having done 1 million miles in the last 100 days). So it's possible they were approaching 3 million miles as of the date of this accident.

That said, the rate of human fatalities is so low that you really have to analyze them on an incident-by-incident basis.

I read another news report that mentioned the victim may have been walking outside the crosswalk.. waiting for more details

So if you're outside the crosswalk you are fair game? What is this, Deathrace?

Depending on the state, it just means you don't have right-of-way. This doesn't mean you're "fair game," it just means that the driver isn't pretty-much-automatically at fault the way they would be if you were, say, crossing within a crosswalk or even more so with a pedestrian control signal. If you're going to step out into the street outside of a crosswalk or against a control, you have a duty to ensure that you are doing so safely.

I'd love to jump on the Uber bashing bandwagon but we might have to reserve judgment here.

I spent most of my automotive years in Boston and pedestrians illegally stepped in front of my vehicle with alarming frequency. I'd swear a few of them were trying to get hit. The rest just seemed a mix of oblivious\intoxicated.

The most memorable was rumbling to a stop a foot in front of one lady who didn't even bother looking at me. In frustration I honked. A serious mistake, I admit. That j-walker proceeded to scream and rake her purse along my hood until I reversed, making a hasty retreat.

I'll be reserving judgment until we know if this was an unforced error.Obviously hitting anyone is a failure mode but not all accidents are avoidable.

Everyone should have predicted that this would happen. If politicians really wanted to improve safety instead of lining their own pockets, they would have pushed for expansion to fixed rail and removed cars from the streets.

And stop whining about how expensive or inefficient it is to run railways across the continental U.S. That never stopped the highway system from being built, which by the way was originally built in a time where the top marginal tax rate was approximately 90%.

Automated cars are over-engineered hype. They don't solve any of our existing traffic problems, and they certainly aren't safer than having humans behind the wheel.

How many pedestrians have died from being struck by human drivers since the advent of testing autonomous cars on public roads? I’ll wager it’s more than one.

Irrelevant. The number you want is pedestrian deaths per number of cars (human or computer driven) on the road. Right now there are very few autonomous vehicles driving around.

I read another news report that mentioned the victim may have been walking outside the crosswalk.. waiting for more details

So if you're outside the crosswalk you are fair game? What is this, Deathrace?

more "if you jump out into the street from between vans where you can't be seen on a street where the speed limit is 40, no autonomous or non-autonomous vehicle will be able to stop for you -- you've challenged physics at this point, not the driver's attentiveness, and will definitely lose."

I think it's actually pretty easy to avoid criticizing the victim. I do it like so:

10 do not criticize victim20 end

Yes. Great. I agree that's a good rule of thumb.

But when someone has the option of crossing safely at the crosswalk or crossing unsafely outside of the crosswalk and they choose the unsafe option, they share responsibility in the outcome when something like this happens. This isn't a "she must have been wearing something provocative" kind of victim-blaming.

So if a plane fails and kills all the passengers on board, is that murder? Should airlines be held responsible for accidents? I don't want to invoke the slippery slope fallacy, but that's a dangerous line of thinking if taken to its logical conclusion.

Would we be saying the same thing if this happend to Waymo instead of Uber?

I'm not sure I can find a case where a plane just "failed." Almost every aviation death can be backtracked to some kind of cause. Failure to maintain. Outside interference. Pilot error. I'd be interested in a citation where such a plane wreck was attributed to "plane failed."

Of course there is always a cause. But in a sufficiently complex system where any number of things could go wrong leading to an accident, it seems to me that it's not always right to assign blame. If we're talking gross negligence then that's one thing, but if there was a design flaw that caused the crash, it's debatable whether the engineers should be held accountable. Maybe they could have done things differently to prevent the negative outcome; maybe they just made an innocent mistake. None of us know enough right now to render judgment on this particular incident.

My point is that accidents happen. There is no way to make a system 100% fail-proof 100% of the time, and you have to invest increasingly more and more as you approach 100% successful operation. At some point as a society we draw a line and say that things are safe enough. We almost certainly aren't there yet with self-driving cars. Regardless, determining accountability when algorithms fail is far from simple in my opinion.

FYI, in the real world, the driver would have be charged with manslaughter with negligence. Most cities have a speeding limit about 25 mph. Is not that hard to stop a car driving at 25mph...unless this car is a driverless car and staking its right of way and to continue to mow down people even though there are people in front of it.....

Very unfortunate, but it was only a matter or time before a fatality related event occurred. Self driving technology is meant to be safer than human drivers, but not infallible. Hopefully with the plethora of sensors on board, the circumstances of the accident can be easily reviewed and preventative measures (if any are possible) can be taken.

"Total perfection or nothing at all" is the modern mantra, unfortunately. To some people, if it's not 100% safe and effective it might as well be 0% safe and effective (as some of the more downvoted posts in this thread show).

The industry has fed this narrative themselves. They've pushed to fast track DMV approvals with the justification that self-driving cars will effectively eliminate traffic casualties and delays are measured in bodily injuries.

What causes traffic jams is when a human driver follows too close to the car in front of them and has to brake, which then sends a "wave" of braking back, stopping traffic and perpetuating the jam.

The correct way to drive is to allow a ~2-3 car gap between the car in front of you so that you have plenty of room to speed up and slow down to match the car in front of you without having to use your brakes. If the person behind you does the same, and so on, it will eventually eliminate the traffic jam.

Now, if you actually try to leave that big of a gap in front of you on the freeway, it'll be instantly filled by other cars trying to weave their way through the jam. If everyone had a self-driving car, everyone would be maintaining the proper gap and the occurrence of traffic jams would be reduced, if not eliminated.

Without assigning blame, and not knowing the facts here, there is one factor that needs to be pointed out which will play into AV's in general.

Fatal accidents do not do anything to improve public perception of AV's.

For most folks, it doesn't matter who was at fault, nor the circumstances by which it happened. Public perception is never really swayed by such nuances. one of the things that's been hugely touted by the automotive industry is AV's being "safer".

Now, before the down-votes start, I'm not playing devils advocate here. I'm just pointing out how people in general - and not the technophiles we are at Ars - will view this. The public is VERY quick to jump to a conclusion right or wrong. And that conclusion often sticks with something for a LOT longer than it would for those who stay informed.

I mention public perception because that's a major hurdle toward the adoption of AV's in general . As much as it pains fans to hear it, AV's are about as popular as Trump is among the general population. (About a 30% approval rate.)

That perception has to change for GENERAL acceptance of the folks out there who will be asked to use this stuff. I've mentioned before that ANY accident by an AV will have a DISPROPORTIONATELY NEGATIVE impact on public perception.

Rightly or wrongly, what people will thinks is, "How are they "Safe" if it mows down pedestrians?"

What MIGHT happen is that the company operating them is blamed, and the AV itself isn't. Even if it was the pedestrian at fault (no way to tell at this point). That wouldn't be as bad as people in general denouncing AV's in general. Still, this incident will not set well in the minds of the doubters, which is bad for AV's because there are way more doubters than there are fans.

How MUCH impact it actually has remains to be seen.

Were I to make a suggestion, AV fans should stop calling them "Safe" or that they remove human error. They are safer, and help mitigate human error, better than most drivers can do. But no matter how well they operate, human error will always play a part on that operation.

This tragic incident, no matter who was at fault, only proves that point.